REVISITING NATIONALISM – 3

 

PRASANNA KUMAR CHOUDHARY

 

NATIONALIST DISCOURSE IN NON-WESTERN COUNTRIES

A vast literature as regards the critique of different aspects of European modernity (including nationalism) is found in ex-colonies, semi-colonies and other oppressed countries.For the enlightened people of these countries, Europe always provoked conflicting and confusing images. Europe defied any one image, one text or one interpretation of itself.Like a Dadaist collage, it was 'everything together'. The Renaissance was true, as was barbarous colonization. The Enlightenment was true, as was slave trade. The Reformationwas true, as was forcible conversion in colonies, the Industrial Revolution was true, as was the primitive accumulation through open loot of colonies.Europe was mesmerizing. It had Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe. There was Michelangelo, and Titian, and Raphael, and Rembrandt. Above all, there wasLeonardo de Vinci. Europe had Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, Leibniz and Cardano, James Watt and Faraday. It had Bacon, Descartes, John Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Spinoza and Hegel; Adam Smith, Ricardo, Sismondi and Karl Marx; Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. Europe had England's Cromwellian Revolution (1649-58) and Glorious Revolution (1688), and of course, 'the mother of all revolutions - the French State Revolution'. It had modern standards in almost every walk of life.

The same mesmerizing Europe was, indeed, a nightmare for the rest of the world. Wherever it laid its steps, the earth turned red. Europe's many great writers, philosophers, scientists and politicians were enthusiastic supporters of its 'bloody civilizing campaign'. Its diplomats, military commanders, ideologues and priests were past masters in thuggery, corruption, drug-pedaling and loot of gold, silver and artefacts. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 'Notes on the State of Virginia, "I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just." And Mark Twain summed up the hypocrisy of the West in following words, "In our country, we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence, never to practise either of them."

It was true that the rest of the world had its own cruelties and barbarities. But could they look into the mirror of Europe to get rid of their own cruelties, their own oppressive, retrograde social institutions? These societies tried time and again to look into the mirror of Europe. But the mirror used to get cracked, and in the cracked mirror, they found their faces deformed, distorted and schizophrenic (James Joyce). We can also borrow words (although used in a different context ) from Ken Kesey ('One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest’) : ' Psycho-ceramics - the cracked pots of mankind '.

In this background, we find an altogether different sort of 'nationalist discourse' in colonial and oppressed countries in the writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, SunYat-Sen, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, Lu Hsun, Premchand, .... and of course, Aime Cesaire ('Discourse on Colonialism', 1950), Franz Fanon ('Black Skin, White Masks', 1952; 'The Wretched of the Earth', 1967), Albert Memmi ('The Colonizer and the Colonized', 1965), Kwame Nkrumah ('Consciencism', 1970), Edward Said ('Orientalism', 1978; 'Culture and Imperialism', 1993), Chinua Achebe ('Things Fall Apart'), Ngugi va Thiongo ('Decolonizing the Mind : The Politics of Language in African Literature'), etc. In this discourse, Jean Paul-Sartre, Michel Foucoult, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (of the Frankfurt school) and a few other post-modern thinkers are frequently quoted.

Aime Cesaire showed how colonialism worked to 'decivilize' the colonizer : torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism. " End result is degradation of Europe itself. Europe is indefensible. " He wrote, "Idea of the barbaric Negro is European invention. Negritude turned out to be a miraculous weapon in the struggle to overthrow the 'barbaric Negro'." Explaining his own point of view, Cesaire in his letter to Maurice Thorez, secretary-general of the French Communist Party, clarified, "I am not going to entomb myself in some straight particularism. But I do not intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism. .... I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all."

Maintaining that 'Europe is literally the creation of the third world,' Franz Fanon said, 'History teaches clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. .... Orthodox nationalism followed along the same track hewn out by imperialism. ....A new system of mobile relationship must replace the hierarchies inherited from imperialism.'

After the economic reforms of 1978, the question of 'West' again came to the centre-stage in the national studies (Guoxue) of Chinese intellectuals. In 1988, a hit television series He Shang (River Elegy, said to be produced by circles around the then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, late Zhao Ziyang) was aired on the Chinese television. This particular TV series offered a melodramatic portrait of the backwardness and tyranny of traditional Chinese civilization, symbolically identified with the Yellow River, while extolling the'Blue ocean of Western civilization' into whose liberating waters the Peoples' Republic of China was now supposed to sail. Obviously this serial was severely criticized. However, in the background of growing relationship with the West, and of building socialism (read capitalism) with Chinese characteristics, Chinese leaders were quite eager to cite West's advanced culture as their source of inspiration. Former President of China Ziang Zemin revealed that as a youngman watching movies in Shanghai, he loved three movies above all others in his life. One was 'Gone with the Wind', the second was a Broadway musical called 'Green Bank on a Spring Morning' and the third was 'A Song to Remember' about Chopin (all three were produced in the thirties and forties of the last century). (19)Needless to say, many Chinese intellectuals were quite conscious of the challenges ahead and the necessity of going beyond the simple-minded dichotomies as traditional/modern, closed/open, socialism/capitalism, communist/anti-communist, etc. , and overcoming the compartmentalization of life and regulations of knowledge operative in complex academic-administrative systems. Professor of Cultural Studies at Shanghai and Professor of Chinese Literature at East China Normal University Wang Xiaoming wrote in his 'A Manifesto for Cultural Studies', " China is currently importing many Western technologies, management practices, cultural products and values, but it is doubtful that she will easily change systems to become a western style modern society like Korea or Japan; rather she will probably become something unique, that we do not expect. It seems impossible to define contemporary China. In almost every respect she fails to fit existing theoretical models, whether familiar or novel. She seems to be an unwieldy behemoth, the most difficult and unprecedented case of social change in the twentieth century history. ....Not only must we consider literature, music, painting, sculpture, and film, we must also pay attention to commercial advertisements, magazines, popular music, soap operas, newspapers, TV shows, window displays and public decorations. ....(When virtual reality so easily unsettles people, can it still be called virtual? In this mixture of true and false, where the virtual and the actual interchange, how is culture to be distinguished from absence of culture?).... Cultural studies in China neither rigidly adhere to existing disciplinary confines, nor strive to become a new discipline itself. ...." (20)

The conflicting images of Europe are summed up by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in following words, " Europe has always figured as a dream, a vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared; a goal to achieve or a danger. A future – but never a memory. .... Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality - I am a fiction writer, so I do not think that is such a bad thing - but you should not worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you will be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul - that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I am critical of that monistic outlook .... It is a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the rhetoric of Us against Them. " (21) (Here I am deliberately leaving out references from the writings of Indian thinkers.)

From the above references, it is quite clear that there is a crucial difference between the European and non-European discourses on nationalism. The difference pertains mainly to different viewpoints.

TWO VIEWPOINTS

The viewpoint that gets manifested prominently in European nationalism seeks to think in terms of absolutely opposing categories, in terms of dichotomies like God vs Satan,Good vs Evil, Civilized vs Barbarous, Right vs Wrong, White vs Black, East vs West, High vs Low, Us vs Them, etc. ( In social sciences, such categorization theories were first formulated by R Dunnet in England in 1896 and in 1902 in France by Professor Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917, and his nephew Professor Marcel Mauss. ) Obviously this viewpoint leads towards launching aggressive campaigns against 'satanic forces' in order to establish the 'kingdom of God', against 'barbarism' in order to 'civilize' the world, against the 'backward East' in order to establish the 'modern West', etc.

Followers of this viewpoint emphasize on the binary basis on which computers or neurons in human brain operate (0-1, on-off). They emphasize on differences, 'irreconcilable differences', and in such situations suggest and effect division or partition. Hence, European nationalism miserably failed in building societies consisting of different nationalities and faiths - in effecting unity amidst diversities.

The other viewpoint that chiefly manifested in the writings of a number of thinkers belonging to the colonial and oppressed countries, seeks to interpret things and phenomena in their relative perspectives. Any phenomenon or object can be viewed from a number of (say, infinite) perspectives - no observation is final since observation never ends. 'There is no Truth,' said Flaubert, 'there are just ways of seeing.' All observations are relative truths and they cannot be posited as opposing categories. Confrontation or conflict takes place only when one relative truth claims to be the only Truth, and hence strives to eliminate all other truths - in short, when one relative truth tries to become the absolute Truth.

This inclusive viewpoint does not believe in exclusivist outlook of fundamental dichotomies; instead, it emphasizes on the coexistence together of many (relative) truths at the same time. It means that every relative truth should be recognized and accorded due respect in its space-time context. It means rejection of illusory, all-encompassing absolutes.As in the Star Wars, in reply to Anakin Skywalker's poser, ' You are either with me or you are my enemy,' Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi replies, ' Only Siths (the Dark Side) believe in absolutes.'

Yes, nerve signals in the brain are normally taken to be 'on or off' phenomena, just as are currents in the electronic circuits of a computer, which either takes place or do not take place. But now neurophysiologists, in search of consciousness, are going beyond the neurons into the subtle world of microtubules in the synaptic clefts where they believe the phenomenon of quantum coherence (of Bose-Einstein Condensation, BEC) occurs and relate this to the phenomenon of consciousness. From the binary world of on or off in the neurons, we enter into the world of quantum coherence (where large number of particles collectively cooperate in a single quantum state) of microtubules. (22)

Since the advent of the humankind, both these viewpoints have played important roles in human progress. Hence they are found in every society (and even in every individual). Given the immense diversity (in every walk of life), the second viewpoint stands at the core of coherent Indian society and has been predominant in the Indian thought. However, in the smriti tradition of our society, the first viewpoint of binary oppositions takes the prominent place. After the formation of the European Union, even western thinkers have become aware of the incompatibility of the first viewpoint with the idea of a unified Europe. Thorbjorn Jagland, secretary general of the Council of Europe, says, 'But one thingis certain: Europeans have learned that to live together peacefully, many points of view need to coexist. ....'As noted earlier, the viewpoint of binary oppositions constitute the core of European nationalism, while the thinkers of oppressed countries seem to veer around the second viewpoint.

Continued.

Next: home/page 16